Janelle Monae’s Afrofuturist diasporas utilizes alter egos and imagination to foster materiality that helps with the blueprints of a futurist exploration of capitalism – link turns the K and proves permutation solves.

Summer 2018 was the summer of Janelle Monae—her sultry, funky “Make Me Feel” filtered out of car windows and pumped through grocery store aisles, and fans seemed ready to embrace her as a symbol of liberated Black queerness. On the heels of the film Black Panther (2018), Monae’s 2018 music film Dirty Computer, with its futuristic exploration of Blackness, capitalism, and technicity, was particularly legible to an American public newly introduced to the concept of Afrofuturism. Although her widespread fame is relatively recent, she has been a major talent in the Atlanta and Kansas City Black music scenes and a much theorized practitioner of Afrofuturist philosophies for the past fifteen years. Monae’s Afrofuturism has generally been attributed to her use of an android alter ego, a character named Cindi Mayweather, who is the heroine of her first three loosely narrative albums. Blurring the lines between her android identity and her construction of self, Monae only performed in tuxedos for the first ten years of her career, a uniform that emphasized androgyny and suggested she was replicable, interchangeable. Dirty Computer is the first of her albums, and thus music films, not to use Mayweather as a protagonist, and many critics and fans saw her break from the android and the tuxedo costume as a liberation, using the rhetoric of authenticity so often associated with coming out to praise her indisputably queer subject matter (as in her song “Pynk,” her 2018 paean to female genitalia). However, this equation between authenticity and Monae’s more legibly racialized, gendered embodiment elides the complexity of her long-standing engagement with the tensions between the technic and the material encoded in the Black female body. In fact, the phrase “dirty computer” is not a departure from Monae’s cyborg vision but an elegant encapsulation of her theory of embodiment. Monae employs the cyborg as a tool for reclaiming visceral, material knowledge, paradoxically using the machinic in service of expanding the definition of the human in an acknowledgment of our somatechnic entanglements.1 Her “dirty computer” describes a virtualized, technic self that nonetheless is characterized by mess, dirt, and inevitable obsolescence, incorporating anachronisms and refusing linear temporality. In conjunction with her repeated insistence on the realization of ...................................................................................................... MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac018 154 MELUS Volume 47 Number 1 (Spring 2022) [129.237.90.151] Project MUSE (2024-07-07 22:27 GMT) University of Kansas Libraries selfhood through a fleshy body materialized through movement as a source of testimony, Monae’s version of Afrofuturist posthumanism celebrates Black female embodiment even as it upends gender and pushes past the limits of the human. I begin by tracing Monae’s engagement with cyborg theory, describing her earlier albums’ explicit and strategic deployment of machinic bodies and establishing her commitment to both materially present embodiment and temporal fugitivity. I discuss how Monae experiments with virtualization as a tool for evading capture by hegemonic regimes of the human, revealing the permeable boundaries between the digital and the material, the object and the subject in her lyrics and her music videos. I conclude with an analysis of the music film Dirty Computer, reading her most recent formulation for the body as a confirmation of the simultaneously enfleshed and technic embodiment Monae has been articulating throughout her career. My curiosity about Monae’s figuration of embodiment was initially piqued through the distinctly modernist, retro-futuristic aesthetics of her early albums and music videos. Her head and shoulders dominate the cover of her first album The ArchAndroid (2010), resplendent with a gold collar, earrings, and headdress that replicates the skyline of an art deco city; she looks like a 1920s vision of a futuristic Nefertiti. The visual language of her music videos echo silent film, framing her wide-eyed face in tight close ups. She makes her engagement with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a modernist masterpiece of film, clear in her homage to his aesthetics and thematics: her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, looks just like the female android in Lang’s film, and her 2008 music video Many Moons begins with a supertitle announcing the Annual Android Auction in Metropolis, an overt reference to Lang and his robotically doubled female lead. Separated by eighty years and created by radically different artists, these two projects center the same questions about what it means to be a body, the possibilities and terrors of the melding of human body and machine, and even share an aesthetic sensibility. What is efficacious for Monae about the cyborg, or about connecting modernist and Afrofuturist articulations of the body beyond the human? Why tie a vision of the future to the concerns of the past? Modernist fascination with the cyborg and the robot is not particularly mysterious; they are images of mechanized life that manifested modern anxieties about the increasingly apparent melding of human with machine. The term robot first appeared in print in the work of Czech playwright Karel Capek, who adapted the word from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor, to describe the automatons in his 1920 play R.U.R. Robots are rooted in concern about the further alienation of humans from their labor and the potential for systems of slavery or serfdom to return through the use of artificial intelligence in what was supposed to be a brave new century where indentured servitude (at least of white people) was a thing of the past. Cyborgs are closely related to robots and androids, but the cyborg relies on feedback—it is cybernetic, a machine that incorporates information and suggests enmeshment with and enhancement of a system understood as human (unlike a robot, which is clearly machine, a cyborg usually has skin or a skin-like covering obscuring its gears, or otherwise incorporates organic or biomechatronic parts). This passing for human or more-than-human quality of the cyborg combines powerfully with anxieties about gender and gendered performance; the female cyborg becomes distinctly horrific because of its pleasingly human aesthetic and sexual characteristics in contrast with its unfeelingness or lack of emotion. The modernist cyborg encapsulates anxiety about women’s increasing participation in the workforce, externalizing fears about the New Woman and her efficiency and financial independence coupled with her desirability and sexual promiscuousness. Trilby’s susceptibility to hypnosis and her robotic obedience to the mystical Svengali in George du Maurier’s wildly popular serialized novel Trilby(1895) comes to mind as an example of a proto-cyborgian character of the New Woman era, as does Mina Harker, the young heroine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); however, her narrative is redeemed as she marries Jonathan Murray, exits the trance that renders her body cold and her mind open to penetration, and returns to appropriately feminine feeling. That Monae adopts a cyborg persona is perhaps equally appropriate given this history: as a Black woman in music, an industry that relies on Black labor and innovation and fashions Black femininity into a saleable product while continuing to marginalize female artists of color, the cyborg is an apt comparison.